What a Crock!: What a stew!

Updating recipes is a bit like remodeling a home. Figure out what you don’t like and decide how best to go about changing it. Look at the latest food trends, check out the local supermarkets or simply try something you haven’t tasted before.

Tired of the same old ingredients? Change them up and bring in some new favorites. Have extra veggies from the garden? Throw them in as well.

It often sounds simpler than it is, but it doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it. You make mistakes along the way, but that’s OK. One thing you learn with age is to laugh with your cooking experiments.

There are hundreds if not thousands of variations in stew recipes and no rights or wrongs for any of them. Whether your stew is meatless or includes pork or beef, the choice is yours. If, however, the stew is meatless, you will need to decrease the cooking time by two or three hours.

Here’s a recipe that has a little bit of everything we liked. Enjoy.